What you say indeed makes quite a lot of sense. However, I'm also contstrained in that I can't modify/patch DBD::Sybase. The admins are unlikely to touch it unless it's part of an official release... The only thing that I CAN control is CDBI, as it is part of a local installation and not centrally installed... I'm going to pursue the issue in the CDBI mailing list in the hope that there is some clever way of turning off prepare_cached... The perldoc makes it sound as if it should be easy, but it's not obvious how to do it without changing the code...